By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
Name: Sarina Behar Natkin
City: Seattle
Age: 37
Occupation: Parent educator and consultant
What’s on her mind these days: “Parenting support. This is my passion.”
“Every parent deals with it.”
“It” is the toddler who won’t stop crying when she doesn’t get what she wants. It’s the 3-year-old and his dad, both of whom are too stubborn to have a civil interaction. It’s the kindergartener acting up in class, to the detriment of his fellow students.
“Every parent has fallouts with their children at one time or another,” says social worker and parent educator Sarina Behar Natkin. “You’re elevated and angry and frustrated, and so is your child, and you have nowhere to go.”
Sarina offers that support in private practice, on a local listserve for discussion among parents, and in classes she teaches. She believes it’s high time the support network that once existed among large, extended families needs to be reasserted and reinvented for today’s harried, digitally connected parent.
“We’re expected to do more and more with less time. In most families, both parents need to work now, and it just doesn’t leave a lot of time to read all the parenting books,” she says. “They don’t have the support and they can’t take the time off.”
Sarina has been trained as an educator through the local Gottman Institute as well as in a movement based upon the book series Positive Discipline by noted family and marriage counselor Dr. Jane Nelsen.
“I really believe [Positive Discipline is] an ongoing role model for having healthy respectful relationships among families and being self-reliant emotionally healthy children,” Sarina says.
Though she has been a social worker for nearly 15 years, Sarina was originally doing crisis work in domestic violence situations. When her first daughter was born five and a half years ago, and she began to see parents struggling with many of the same issues, she turned her attention to helping them. She has since substituted as a parent educator in the Seattle Central Community College co-op preschool system, taught “Bringing Baby Home” courses for Jewish Family Service, and was doing informal consulting for friends and their families. Earlier this year, Sarina bought a business license, set up a Web site, and parlayed that informal consulting into a private practice, in which she offers family coaching and workshops.
Around the same time, Sarina and another “Bringing Baby Home” instructor, Melissa Benaroya, independently came up with the idea of creating what Benaroya said has been lacking beyond Seattle’s rich offering of support for parents of newborns.
“We both kind of felt like we needed to create a place for all parents, no matter what your parenting style is,” she says. “A place you could go with any normal issue.”
The two had met in several different venues, and they found a connection with each other.
“We have very similar backgrounds and upbringings, and so we’ve met one another probably once a quarter just to check in,” Benaroya says.
So in addition to their private practices, she and Sarina have entered the nascent stages of creating a nonprofit that will offer parenting education and support for working with children ages newborn to 10 — in essence, being the resource for normal problems that tells parents it’s okay to have these problems.
“Certainly you don’t go to a child psychologist because you’re having bedtime struggles. Where do you go?” Sarina says. Their new program is “a preventative model. It’s giving the people tools ahead of time before they hit the crisis.”
Sarina now has two children, and she and her husband Michael are active in the Kavana Cooperative. Later this month, she’ll be offering a talk to Kavana preschool parents about social and emotional development.
“I think it’s really nice when there’s a volunteer role that bridges between the professional and personal,” says Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum, Kavana’s executive director.
Nussbaum calls Sarina “a wonderful social connector,” and said that when she sees new faces at events, they often will have learned about the organization through that connection.
As for her career, Sarina says she is happier now than she has ever been — and loves helping parents learn about overcoming the inevitable challenges they run into.
“We all need support. It’s not about failing,” she says. “We need to say it’s okay to take the time to learn. It’s not a failure, it’s just an opportunity to take the time to grow.”
Information about Sarina Behar Natkin’s consulting practice can be found at www.sarinanatkin.com.